For God's Sake, Keep it Down!

Monday, which was Family Day, none of our adult kids and their partners could be with us, so we drove north of Sharbot Lake to pay a last visit to the farm of a couple who have been friends for so long we consider them family. We have been going there for the better part of twenty years and I have mused about our experiences there many times. We love these hospitable folk and we have loved the silence and solitude of the fields and the bush and the river of their property. Of course "silence" does not refer to an absence of sound, because a barnyard is never soundless, nor for that matter are the forest and water. We did soak in the relative absence of noise, the sonic clutter of our culture.

We are happy for our friends that they will enter into a phase of life with less responsibility but we will miss these oasis moments. I have often found this a place of creativity and spiritual renewal. They assure us that their new home was chosen for the quiet.

As we drove home we listened to a podcast of the NPR program called On Being by Krista Tippett which was an interview with Gordon Hempton. http://www.onbeing.org/program/last-quiet-places/4557 Hempton is an acoustical engineer who has quixotically searched for the last places in the United States without human-made noise. He claims, rightly I think, that noiseless places are an endangered species and the number remaining can literally be counted on the fingers of his two hands. He describes the world as a "solar-powered jukebox" with lots of sounds, but he makes the distinction between the sounds of the natural world and the cacophony of noise we often struggle to filter.

Yesterday I came across a Guardian Online article about the increasingly adverse effects of noise on Brits:

People are becoming increasingly intolerant of loud music, barking dogs, noisy neighbours, road traffic and aircraft noise, a major government survey has found.According to a government survey of attitudes conducted once a decade, noise has risen from ninth to fourth since 2000 in the league table of perceived local environmental problems and is now on a level with air pollution and only behind dog fouling, litter and the loss of green belt land.
Research by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs found that 48% of the 2,750 people surveyed in England and Wales felt that their home life was being spoilt by noise, with one in five saying it kept them awake at night. But while the survey found little change in the proportion of people saying they are affected of unwelcome noise, 11-17% more people said they were significantly upset by it. “There has been a strongly statistically significant increase in the proportion of respondents who report being bothered, annoyed or disturbed to some extent by road traffic, neighbours , aircraft and building ... despite no material increase in the proportion of the population hearing noise from these four sources,” said the report.

Many of the important biblical figures, including Jesus, heard God in places away from the distractions and noise of daily life, and they lived in eras long before the incessant mechanical sounds of our time. How do we let God get a word in edge-wise if there is never any silence?

Do you need silence in order to creative or to have a sense of inner peace? If so, how do you find it? Does God speak to you in the silence?